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On Ugliness
In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we’re most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton’s Satan to Goethe’s Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice. With abundant examples of painting and sculpture ranging from ancient Greek amphorae to Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya among others, and with quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative discussion explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature..
Price: $22.48
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Shrek!
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The Power of Face Reading (2nd Edition)
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Duckling Ugly (Dark Fusion)
Cara is so ugly, mirrors would rather break than show her reflection Not even her own parents can deny her ugliness, and nothing can make up for the cruelty of her schoolmates Tormented and tortured by the shallow people of Flocks Rest, Caras life is miserable. Then Cara receives a shimmering note from some exotic place suggesting that theres more to her than meets the eye. Cara wonders if her destiny has something to do with her recurring dreams of a beautiful green valley where the people are so accepting, her ugliness doesnt matter. Soon, Cara discovers that her valley of dreams is real. Its a place where the ugliest of ducklings can become swans. A swan, however, can have a serious taste for revenge . . . deadly revenge..
Price: $3.25
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The Very Ugly Bug
There once was a very ugly bug, with spotted legs, googly eyes and a horrible hairy back. She wonders why her friends have pretty small eyes, shiny green backs, or nice fluttery wings. The ugly bug thought that if she looked like her friends, then she would be more beautiful. So she made herself a disguise. But her new costume made her even tastier looking to the birds! When a bird swoops down to gobble up the disguised ugly bug, something strange happens⦠The big scare made the very ugly bug even uglier! So ugly in fact, that the bird was scared away. The ugly bug learns that just being herself is the best defense. Liz Pichonâs witty text and colorful artwork highlight this story about self-acceptance..
Price: $10.09
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Underbelly: Additional Observations on the Beauty/Ugliness of Mostly Pillowy Girls (Weasel #7)
A collection of luscious oil paintings in tribute to pillowy female forms.Subtitled "Additional Observations on the Beauty/Ugliness of Mostly Pillowy Girls," Underbelly is a hardcover art book featuring over 50 of Cooper's luminescent oil paintings and lush drawings, each focusing on the female form. Underbelly is the follow-up to Cooper's acclaimed first book of paintings, Overbite. Since the success (and immediate sell out) of Overbite, Cooper has been producing new work at a fevered pitch for gallery shows and patrons alike. Although much of the work in Underbelly appears to have slithered out of a similar same place as Overbite, this latest batch has a decidedly darker and more urban flavor. Cooper's meticulous glazing method of oil painting lends an almost unsettling obsessiveness and depth to his subjects: primarily innocent, or vacant, or menacing, or predatory women wearing little or nothing, and writing around a variety of settings, all produced over the past two years for a number of gallery shows in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Before devoting himself mostly to painting over the last two years, Cooper created several acclaimed graphic novels, including Ripple, Suckle, Dan & Larry and others. He also contributed designs to the Matt Groening television series Futurama, and has collaborated with comedian David Cross and Vice magazine founder Gavin McInnes. 48 full-color pages, 10" x 10"..
Price: $12.55
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Plain and Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction
“If beauty is truth, is ugliness falsehood and deception? If all art need concern itself with is beauty, what need have we to explore in our literature the nature and consequences of ugliness?” In Plain and Ugly Janes, Charlotte Wright defines and explores the ramifications of a new character type in twentieth-century American literature, the “ugly woman,” whose roots can be traced to the Old Maid/Spinster character of the nineteenth century. During the 1970s, stories began to appear in which the ugly woman is a figure of power—heroic not in the traditional old maid’s way of quiet, passive acceptance, but in a way more in keeping with the active, masculine definition of heroic behavior. Wright uses these stories to discuss the nature and definitions of ugliness and the effects of female ugliness on both male and female literary characters in the works of a range of American authors. Wright concludes that the ugly woman character allows American authors to explore the ironies and inequalities inherent in the beauty system..
Price: $15.96
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
"Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound’s phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme—the self-styled "Men of 1914"—responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin’s art criticism, Eliot’s literary journalism, Lewis’s pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery. .
Price: $50.00
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